


Always in this Twilight

by DachOsmin



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Nazgûl | Ringwraiths, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-19 12:43:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22711006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DachOsmin/pseuds/DachOsmin
Summary: She does not remember her name, or her father’s house, or how many children she bore her husband the king over the long span of her marriage to him.
Relationships: OFC/OFC, Ringwraith/Ringwraith
Comments: 15
Kudos: 54
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Always in this Twilight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Solanaceae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/gifts).



She does not remember her name, or her father’s house, or how many children she bore her husband the king over the long span of her marriage to him.

What she remembers is this: the first time she met the stranger, in the wake of her husband’s funeral, on the cusp of a moonless night.

The mourners had gone, and the spectators too: it was only her, watching over the bier, her crown a heavy weight on her head. She was hunched by then, wizened. Her back ached, and the arthritis in her gnarled hands was bitter from the cold.

The stranger stepped out of the shadows. He had entered the room quietly, or else he had been there all along. She knew she should greet him, ask him his name and from whence he hailed— but she was wrung out. Not from grief, per se—for she had not loved her husband, even now she remembers this— but from both the toil of greeting and speaking to so many sycophants who were already dividing up the corpse of her husband’s kingdom, and also from the bone-deep weariness of age.

So she did not greet the stranger that came late to her husband’s funeral, only acknowledged him with a small nod which he returned. They stood side by side for a time, gazing at the bier.

“I had hoped to speak to him before he passed,” the man said at last. “I could have spared him this.”

She considered this. Her husband’s illness had been long and slow. None of the healers in this realm or any nearby had been able to arrest its spread. But there had been rumors…

The stranger sighed. “It is man’s greatest desire, to escape death,” he said, as if relating an immutable fact.

Only yesterday she would have accepted this, as she accepted the pronouncements of her husband and his counselors and her sons, all in equal measure. But now she felt curiously unmoored from propriety. “No,” she said. “It is not. Not always.”

He turned to her with a curious eye. “Do you wish to die, my lady?”

“No,” she said, tasting her words for truth as she spoke them. “Merely to live.”

“Ahh,” he said. His eyes sharpened, and she felt that he was seeing her anew. “ _Ahh_.” He looked down at her gnarled hands, pointed at the iron oath ring she still wore. “Tell me,” he asked. “Do you mean to remove that in your widowhood?”

She had heard stories. There were rumors and whispers in the eddies of the court. Of rings, and a golden stranger that came offering gifts to mortal kings, gifts that came with a terrible price.

She looked down at the ring her husband had jammed onto her finger at their betrothal, all those years ago. It was an ugly thing, and the ill-fitting band nagged at her arthritis on cold days. “Perhaps I would remove it,” she said slowly, and looked up to meet the stranger’s gaze. “If I had another to wear in its place.”

***

She does not remember her name, and in time all others forget it as well. She becomes only The Eighth, nameless and sexless and somehow less and more than human. She becomes something out of legend, a monster to frighten children with.

She revels in their fear. It is a kind of power, and even though she does not use it, it tastes sweet all the same.

The tell her story, and the story of the others, with such horror: that such proud kings—they say only kings, they have forgotten her, or never knew her in the first place—bent the knee, accepted a master. But she had masters for all of her first life. Father, husband, sons—at least now she gets something in the bargain.

He does not often require her services. The others sleep for years at a time, dreaming of half-forgotten glories. But she has none which she wishes to remember, and so she spends the years riding through strange lands.

In her past life, she was never alone. She rode through the streets of the city in a palanquin, a box to separate her from the world outside. Sometimes she felt that there was another box around her, one she couldn’t see. Her every move was watched by chaperones or seneschals or servants, the outer confines of her body, her self, were built from their perspectives.

When she rides, she is alone, and there is no one to see her, and in seeing her, define her. Her existence swells and expands, until the only things tethering her to the earth are the places where she presses against her horse, and the weight of the ring on her finger.

She is free.

***

The whispers of the others tell her that their master has found an owner for the final mortal ring. The Ninth.

She goes to welcome the newcomer, although she is not required to. It is strange: there is so little that she remembers, but habits linger hard in the body. One welcomes newcomers to court.

She goes to the chambers set aside for the Ninth, pauses in the doorway. As a rule they do not speak to each other, having little to say. But still—“Well met,” she rasps.

The Ninth turns to her. There is nothing to suggest a face in the blackness of the cowl, but she imagines that she is being scrutinized. “Well met,” the newcomer says at last.

That voice! A woman’s voice!

As a rule, they do not spend time with each other. But still… “I ride for Rhûn on the morrow,” she says. “You may come, if you wish it.”

***

The Ninth does not join her in the stables, and so she sets off alone. It is only when she stops on a far hill, drinking in the shades of darkness in the sky, that she hears the quiet clip clop of hooves as the Ninth rides up to her side.

“Does the Master require our services?” she asks.

A tilt in the cowl, a slight clench in the gauntlets grasping the reins. These are how they speak, how they come to know each other. “No,” the Ninth says at last. “I wished to ride.”

***

She does not remember her name, or her father’s house, or how many children she bore her husband the king over the long span of her marriage to him.

What she remembers is this: that first ride together, the first of many. The way their black cowls flowed behind them in the wind as their mares ate up the miles, the brilliant darkness of the night, and something like peace.


End file.
